Jack Bros.

released on Sep 29, 1995

The portal between Earth and another mysterious dimension has opened, and the intrepid Jack Brothers have come through for an adventure in our world. Having lost track of time, they now have only one hour to return to their home or be banished forever. Help them battle hoards of loathsome enemies through six electrifying 3-D levels, each with many floors to explore and conquer. This is one phenomenal adventure you can't afford to miss!


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Behold, the first Megaten game to ever make it outside of Japan! A really cute game, it just falls into the Atlus trappings of it becoming needlessly hard at the end.

The Jack of your choice (should be Jack the Ripper/Jack Skeleton for attack power, but it's my boy Jack Frost) gets trapped in the Human World, and must fall down floors to make it back to Fairy World. Because of this, you don't really have health per se, but a timer that you lose time every time you get hit. Your timer carries between floors, but not between areas.

The first area is easy, at just 3 floors. Pixie tutorializes everything so most floors you'll be greeted by her talking about the new enemy. There's even a floor where she says she doesn't know what to say anymore.

The problem however is each area becomes longer and longer, the the point of feeling dragged out. The final area, Crystal Palace, is 19 FLOORS LONG and is followed up by a two-phase final boss with massive HP that if you fail, you have to do ALL 19 FLOORS AGAIN. These are featuring bulky enemies that can corner you easily and force you to use a special or lose time. It becomes tedious to redo all that since they play out the same each time.

It's a cute game with adorable art and good music but damn if I were in charge I'd tone down the difficulty in the second half.

Shin Megami Tensei tries out a little bit of Tower of Duraga and a little bit of Sokoban mechanics to make a game that, while perfectly fun to play, does very little to do anything new. You can play as one of the three "Jack Brothers", by which I mean you can play as two of them to have fun, and can play as Jack Frost to make yourself suffer twice as badly. Now imagine it all on a really short timer.

It's fun! It is, I promise! But it's main charm stems from fun use of the limited Virtual Boy design options, and the gameplay won't do much to make you go through another play.

You're never gonna see me play another Megami Tensei game on here so enjoy it.

The timer is the easily worst thing about this game, and that's saying something for a VIRTUAL BOY release. I thought the use of 3D was pretty cool with showing your actual progression on the floors. It's easy to see why this didn't catch on tho.

Also the pixie talks wayyy to much.

Like all the other reviews already mention having a timer instead of a life bar is annoying for a variety of reasons, but it's especially puzzling to me since I assume it's there to add difficulty to the game, despite Jack the Ripper making the game your bitch for free. Besides that there's not much to talk about except oh my fucking god pixiE SHUT THE FUCK UP
SHUT UP
I FUCKING HATE YOU WHY CAN'T YOU JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP

The 3/5 is only because I am reviewing the game from a modern perspective and because the game doesn't have much to it, not that it needs anything more.

It's a shockingly fun game, and it's not frustrating at all, which is surprising for how old it is. The game-play loop is good, and I really like the way the game uses time instead of a typical health bar.

I do object to ATLUS having "Jack the Ripper" as the third Jack Brother; he does not match up to Frost or Pyro's wonderful designs and characters. I think this is a fumble that will stain the franchise's past.